


Long Term Reparations

by Anonymous



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: F/F, Hallucinations, Isolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 13:42:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2390444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Odd as it may be, according to the Incubator, according to Mami, to Kyouko, they are nonetheless a team.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Term Reparations

When they were thirteen and fragile, Homura sometimes spoke about an old friend. They all assumed the girl was from her old school. Mami was the first to realize that she must have died. When Homura spoke of her, she had the same wistful look Mami caught in the mirror when she thought too long about her parents. Sayaka was the first to realize that Homura had loved that friend. She spoke of the dead girl just as painfully, hatefully, desperately as Sayaka described Kyousuke, her tongue heavy with a familiar bitter tone. Kyouko was the first to realize that her friend had been an untouchable idol to her. Someone who lit Homura's eyes with the same passion Kyoko had once felt for her father’s god, and none of the dull blight of betrayed experience.

Eventually, recollection of this Madoka fell away in the constant demands of combat. Demons did not care if you were thinking of the fight or of a lost love. Their only concern was that you were distracted, and when Homura spent two months laid up in Mami’s bedroom, leg a mangled mess that took more magic than any of them liked to heal, she learned to put aside old and painful memories.

She had a new life, one sworn and dedicated to Madoka in a way. But Madoka’s cause had always been hope, joy, comfort for the weary and the worn. And Homura was nothing,  _nothing_  if not weary. It was not a betrayal, to let herself linger in reality over recollection.

She had to remind herself constantly.

* * *

Mami was the eldest, of course. Their mother and teacher in turns. But no one would ever deny Sayaka and Kyouko their titles of precocious brats.

Mami had chittered to herself over boiling water and congealing syrups. They thought they were being so  _clever_. 

Homura didn’t understand what was so funny about half of their team wandering off overseas for three months and leaving the two of them to watch other their territory alone.

Not that they couldn’t handle it, of course. But, panting and wrung out after the third straight week of nightly patrol, Homura couldn’t even gather the necessary clarity of thought to remember that her body was a puppet and exhaustion was optional. 

And still Mami had steady enough hands to enter the passcode to her building, and a steady enough memory to recall her address and which delivery places were still open this late in her neighborhood.

A week later, Mami had acquired dust covers from quite possibly another universe and moved into Homura’s apartment full time.

"Just until the girls get back, of course. But you can’t take care of yourself when you’re working so hard every night."

Grinding away under the weight of her own skill, Homura finally forgot to  think of the soul-deep gratitude and relief of Mami’s diligent caretaking as a violation, trespassing in some other magical girl’s territory.

* * *

No. One. Spoke. Japanese.

In  _hindsight_  this was patently obvious, because Italy was distinctly  _not Japan._ In actuality, it meant that Sayaka was beyond dependent on Kyouko’s continued good graces, and by the halfway point of their little globetrotting adventure, those graces had all but worn out entirely.

Alas, when confrontted abotu learning a new language overnight, Cubattri had given the exact same One Wish line that Kyubey would have. In the same tone. With the same expression, and the same voice.

If it hadn’t been for Kyouko’s insistence of the local Puella Magi’s insistence that the incubator was definitely not Kyubey, Sayaka wouldn’t have believed it.

As it was, when they weren’t helping the local girl in a showing of good faith, Sayaka was loafing around their hotel room trying to decide if she should try to get the incubator’s attention somehow  _just_  so she could talk to someone other that stubborn, obnoxious, unbelievably grating and way too full of herself Kyouko, who insisted again  _and again and again_ that if Sayaka was bored she could just  _wander around_  until she found something interesting.

Wander around unfamiliar territory populated by people who  _didn’t speak Japanese_. Brilliant.

And she had been so  _excited_  about this trip, six weeks ago. About the chance to be the undivided center of Kyouko’s attention. Well, news flash, that attention was sandpapery and awful, and no amount of waking up curled into her stomach because she was some kind of squidlike cuddle-machine in her sleep was worth all this.

Things had just been so much  _easier_  before. When Mami would break them up, or Homura would say some ridiculously monotone quip that should have been delivered with Kyouko’s dramatics or Sayaka’s enthusiasm, and just destroyed the mood with its incongruity.

She buried her head in the musty smelling pillow and screamed so loudly, so long that she hadn’t even noticed anyone in the room until the mattress dipped beside her.

"Mi dispiace." It was Kyouko’s voice, lilting around foreign syllables, and it just made everything so, so much worse. Sayaka clung to her pillow like a shield, refusing to look. Kyouko just pulled her upright, hugging her as she shook, as if that would calm the swelling rage of utter, utter isolation. "Andremo a casa. We’ll go home. We’ll go right now, I’m sorry, it’s okay."

Maybe it wasn’t just the foreign language.

Maybe it was a foreign fear, too, stretching her voice thin and fragile.

"I don’t want to hate you." Sayaka offered, not sure what was happening, not sure how to stop herself. At least the pillow robbed her voice of some of that alien tenderness. "I don’t want to."

* * *

They tumbled into Mami’s apartment thirty nine days ahead of schedule, and immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion. 

Everything was covered in thin white sheets; her couches turned to corpses and her chairs to ghosts. 

They fell against eachother beside the glass coffee table. It had always been sparklingly clear, and now it was layered with dust, and there was nothing to do but sob. Kyouko clung to Sayaka’s shoulders like she had forgotten how to be a girl, instead becoming a rusted shut iron framework. Sayaka tangled her fingers in the fountain length of Kyouko’s ponytail until her circulation was cut off and they went white and tingly.

Eventually, because they were young and bereaved, they fell further, lying beside each other on Mami’s unkept carpet, clumsily working their way through learning to kiss. There were too many tears and too much snot for it to be anything close to romantic.

Further on in time, they came back to themselves and realized if Mami was… gone. Then Homura may have been as well.

They clamoured onto the rooftop of the building, transformed together, and charged over the cityscape faster than the bus lines, or even the monorail could take them. It was a frivolous waste of magic, but it hardly mattered in that dark, damp moment.

They slammed into Homura’s spacious white-on-white-on-white home thirty eight days and eighteen hours ahead of schedule, hands clutched together tightly enough to grind bones. Sayaka was silent, and Kyouko muttering prayers to a god she hadn’t believed in for years, hoping beyond hope that they would find a smear of grey and violet there.

Mami greeted them from one of the inner doorways, looking sleepweary. Her hair was loose and ruffled casting a golden halo behind her face, to match the gauzy nightgown that glowed in the strange atmosphere of Homura’s apartment. They fell on her, sobbing. Kyouko, a half-step ahead of Sayaka, flung her arms haphazardly around Mami’s neck with such force that she stumbled backward, unsteady. Sayaka was there an instant later casting her own hug wider, to catch Kyouko and Mami’s backs, both. Kyouko pressed her face to Mami’s cheek, and Sayaka burrowed into the curve of her shoulder, and there, they rattled over each other, a cacophony of fears grief undone in the span of seconds.

* * *

Homura wandered vaguely out of her bedroom, summoned by the clamour of tears and bitten off comforts just in time to witness Sayaka being twice as foolhardy as ever, and outlining the worst of her terrors directly against Mami’s lips.

"We thought you died, your  _house_  it’s just, it’s all. What  _happened_?”

Kyouko had gone still and silent, and Mami and Sayaka were far too close, staring into each other’s panicky eyes, to realize it.

Well.

If Homura had learned exactly one thing over these last few weeks, it was that a good half of Mami's ability to turn confusion into honeyed comfort was based in the timely introduction of sugar and tea.

Seconds stuttered silent at her bidding, and she slipped into the kitchen, keeping hold of the handle of the kettle so it actually bothered to boil. The tea tray that she had to assume was Mami’s, because it could not possibly be hers, was drying over the sink. She arranged cups on it precisely. Measured leaves into the pot. Splashed hot water over them. Curls of steam froze and warped as she placed the lid and allowed the ticking of clocks to return to its natural flow.

Her voice was perfectly flat as she answered Sayaka’s question before Mami could stumble over herself or Kyouko could screech out something incoherent with rage. “Well, we thought that since you and Kyouko were going to spend the summer in bed together, we might as well try it too.”

Kyouko and Sayaka startled, too knotted up together with Mami to actually backtrack in panic. Sayaka had the decency to flush furiously. Mami just giggled in that knowing way of hers.

"Oh now," Homura continued, voice still devoid of tone. But there was a smile edging onto her face as she crossed past their cluster to place the tea setting on the table. "You don’t have to stop on my account."

It was  _possible_  that she’d made a mistake with her delivery. After so many years- years and years- of modulating any trace of emotion out of her voice, to give herself airs of authority so that she might command the shape of fate itself, she hadn’t quite figured out how to express things as easily as everyone else.

They untangled from eachother, Sayaka and Kyouko looking shamed, and Mami as implacable as ever.

Homura frowned deeply. Tried again.

"Are you going to stop anyway?"

Mami laughed again, and it sounded like secrets Homura wasn’t allowed to know. She didn’t care for those, even if Mami, two years her senior, had more womanly mystique in an eyelash that all three of the rest of them put together. Mystique was how people got  _killed_.

She didn’t think that this is a killing situation.

"What Homura is trying to say is we all have a lot to discuss, don’t we?"

That was in no way what Homura was trying to say. But it was, possibly, the next logical step past what she was trying to say, so it would do.

* * *

_She watches over them all, waiting, breathing, being. There are more magical girls now than there ever have been, and they are all hers._

_But it is this quartet that she cherishes above all, that she spends her spun glass fragments of consciousness and free energy in seeing._

_When their times come, she wants to welcome them into her arms so quickly that, perhaps, they won’t even realize they’ve died._

_That time comes sooner than she would have chosen, but it isn’t her choice. Simply her reward._

* * *

Every morning, Sayaka stumbled blearily out of Homura’s ridiculously large bed far earlier than the others. They might have given up after middle school, but she was still trying to carve out some semblance of normalcy for herself, even if that normalcy meant leaving a bed with three other magical girls in it for the cool, sterile halls of her high school.

 _Someone_  had to be Hitomi’s friend, after all.

And that was how everything went to shit. Being Hitomi’s friend. They had noticed it before, all of them. Hitomi seemed to attract Demons like vinegar attracted gnats. They swarmed around her, laying still and camouflaged until something disturbed them and they flowed out into an impenetrable cloud.

It wasn't her  _fault_  but it still got a gaping hole punched through Sayaka’s stomach, shattering her gem.

The disturbance was enough to summon Kyouko, Mami and Homura. Hitomi would live. Their friend would live. 

It felt like a hollow consolation.

They carried Sayaka’s body to the top of the Mitakihara tower, where Mami conjured up a fireshow worthy of her memory to turn bones to dust and blood to ash. They could hardly afford to have a corpse connected to them. 

Sayaka was there, of course. A cool, pale arm held her spirit upright, steadying her as she watched her team dispose of her. Perfectly soft, precise fingers curled through her hair as they fell into a pile together, one body short. Homura as still and sullen as ever, while tears tracked down Mami’s face and Kyouko screamed at the empty sky.

"I’ve been waiting so long to see you again," the girl in white whispered into her incorporeal ear. "You won’t be waiting nearly as long as that."

It unlocked some dead thing in her chest, and Sayaka turned to curl into the girl, sighing a name she barely even knew. A name that she has known all her life, and all the ones before it. 

"Take me home, Madoka."

"Always."

* * *

Mami was the next to fall. Pink and gold clouds illuminated the dawn sky over her vacant corpse. They three were older now. Magical women, more than girls. 

Just last week, she had made a joke about calling themselves witches, because they were turning into old hags. Homura had broken her usual monotony to yell and swear that they were never, would never  _be_ witches.

Kyouko had sat by as the fight boiled over, recalling witch hunts and witch burnings and all those things that had once been the fairy stories of her childhood.

Ultimately it had barely been a blip on the women’s radar.

Mami thought of it now with aching regret, as a woman made of starlight and daybreak hung over her shoulders in a loose embrace. 

Kyouko and Homura may have been almost incomprehensibly strong fighters, but with only the two of them? They would burn out faster than falling meteors. Most certainly, they would never be old hags together.

"Would you really want to be old and broken together, when you can be safe and happy and young?" The woman asked, with genuine, childlike curiousity. Mami wasn’t sure how to answer.

She suspected dimly that she should shrug this angel of death off, but the comfort was too much to give up.

"Forever is a very, very long time to be anything." She said, and the woman laughed with such a heavy, ancient weight that it must have summoned a real breeze to ruffle her cold body's hair and skirts.

"It’s not that bad, once you get the right people together." Offered a voice absent of naive inquiry or timeless grief.

The woman curled her fingers over Mami’s ghostly eyes as she gaped, turned, sought a face she hadn't seen in years. The woman’s laughter lost its strange opacity, as she breathed into Mami’s ear, “Guess who!”

"Sayaka?"

"Ding ding! Correct!"

Memories of childish crushes and teenage adulation clamoured in Mami’s chest as the woman’s hands fell away. And there she was, still sixteen and precocious to Mami’s twenty two.

"You know, if anyone else ate half as much cake as you did, it wouldn’t all go to their  _tits_.” Sayaka spat, all false jealousy and real delight. 

"As if you can’t do the same thing!" Madoka chimed in, taking Mami’s hand gently. For a moment, she couldn't guess where the name had come from. And then she couldn't image how she'd ever forgotten it, as all her deaths- all her lives- converged on her.

"Oh." She whispered, while Sayaka grabbed at her other hand, pulling them forward.

* * *

Homura stared at Kyouko’s body without seeing it.

She had seen them all die  _so many_ times. But this was the only the second time Kyouko had left behind a corpse, rather than immolating herself or being caught in a witch’s labyrinth. 

Kyouko stared at Homura without being seen.

Something broke apart in her head. Just another fracture criss crossing scars left by Sayaka, by Mami, by Hitomi, by her Father. Normally, she would have been screaming by now.

It felt pointless. Deeply, cavernously unnecessary.

She tried to brush Homura’s hair away where it had cascaded to hide her face, trailing into the garish pool of blood beneath Kyouko's body. Her fingers drifted through, without ruffling a single strand. She sighed, kneeling down beside herself, beside her partner of an entire lifetime. 

It had been six years since they'd lost Hitomi, another two since Mami. With Kyouko gone, Homura would have no one to drag her back from the constant attempts on her own life. 

Kyouko was never meant to be a guardian, but Homura had needed one. Needed one still, so much. 

An unnatural wind kicked up in the living room where they knelt together, separated by the veil of life and death. Homura snapped her gaze so suddenly up that Kyouko could not help matching it. And there stood a woman who looked like the promise of a new day striking up against the cascade of nightfall in her skirts. 

She was looking at Kyouko with eyes that seemed gold straight on, and yet petal pink as soon as she glanced away.

"Can she see you?" Kyouko asked, and her voice was so tired. Were those her words? When had she gotten so  _old_? 

The woman shook her head, and for a moment it seemed as if entire skies had been replaced by identical fabrications, stars pulled out of alignment by the wisps of her hair. 

"But we can always see her. Akemi Homura, who ruined an entire universe out of love."

The understanding slid into place so easily, so keenly that for a moment, nothing had changed at all. Kyouko had simply been stolen away, replaced with a perfect copy of herself.

"She’s going to wreck herself just as bad."

"Then we will have to put her back together." Madoka said, and it was a gift of molten gold that slid into the cracked porcelain of her skull and gilt the scars into something beautiful.

"There’s gonna be  _time_  for that?” What else could it mean?

Madoka laughed, rich and fluttery. “When it comes to Homura, there’s time for everything.”

Kyouko snorted, staring at the smooth face of the woman she had loved for so long. Memorizing it, so that when the time came she would be able to recognize it, no matter how it may yet have changed. “Guess you’re right.”

She uncurled, stood tall and proud. Maybe even vain. Towering over Madoka, though she knew as sure as anything that it was only in the same way a blade of grass might tower over the entire sea.

Still, if this was how she went into eternity, she was going to need to make a show of it, holding her soul as stark as a blood slashed across a white, white carpet.

People were laughing at her, and with all the grace of nearly two decades of magical warfare, she turned an imperial glare on them, only to falter sharply. Perhaps it was fortunate after all, that she could not trip over her own corpse. Her ankles slipped through it like air.

"I  _told_  you she’d peacock it!” Sayaka crowed, delighted to one-up Kyouko as always. Mami hid her smile behind a genteel hand, but her eyes were crinkled in a dead giveaway. 

"I don’t think anyone didn’t believe you," She chided, and barely had enough time to steady herself before Kyouko had launched herself at them, arms splayed out wide enough to catch them both. The stumbled in a cluster against Madoka’s side, and she laughed delightedly as she balanced them all, and shepherded them back, away.

* * *

Every time her soulgem darkens, it blinds Homura with the chance, the teetering possibility, the desperate notion that maybe she’ll see Madoka again. She doesn’t have room in her stiff, aching soul to hope for anything more. Just a glimpse of the girl she destroyed everything for. That’s all she wants, now.

And every time her soulgem darkens, that thrill of joy chases the blackness away.

It’s an eternity of hell, trapped by her own belief.

Her fiftieth birthday passes, and she resolves to stop believing in Madoka. She’ll never be able to die otherwise.

Her hundredth passes and she can’t remember having made that resolution once before.

Every half century she swears to break herself of traitorous hope, but she never seems to be able to pull out its roots; it grows back anew.

She rages against her own body, shrieks at the cavern of a world that has died while she lives, and lives, and walks, and  _lives_.

She doesn’t know when the last time she saw so much as a meagre human was. Incubators stayed a little longer. Demons a fraction further still. But it has been so long that she isn’t certain she has ever been anything but alone.

Her body reforms to the demands of her magic, of her mind, but she doesn’t remember what she’s supposed to look like either. Insanity clutches her thoughts, melts her face and figure.

Has she always had wings? Has the world always been an unending maze? Flat and dimensional, patterns that do not move, light that does.

She lies down in the filth and ruins, stares at the dingy grey sky, blinds herself with the curling comfort of her wings. They are dark and they make her thoughts hurt, but there are colors in them. Colors that no longer exist. Colors that never existed.

Something in her hand cracks like the memory of glass.

* * *

Eternity is a very long time. Long enough that, with the right people, they might one day see her whole and solid again.

Until then, wisps of colors that don’t exist play over Homura’s blind soul. Water and blood, pastry and dawn.


End file.
